Edie parker kerouac biography books

Born into a wealthy upper-class family, Edie grew up surrounded by a life of privilege and prosperity that she began to see as a sort of ghetto, a gilded cage she desperately wished to escape. In New York, by way of a mutual friend named Henri Cru who became Remi Boncoeur in On the Road , she met Jack Kerouac, also eighteen, and soon became enmeshed in his wide circle of friends.

Kerouac was attending Columbia on a football scholarship, already a devoted writer and student of literature. They soon fell in love and moved into an apartment with Joan Adams future wife of William Burroughs , and the circle of friends widened to include Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Hal Chase and many others—all key figures in what was later known as the Beat Generation.

But Kerouac did not fare well in sterile, upper class Grosse Point. Eventually he returned to New York, alone, and caught another ship; from then on the couple began to drift further and further apart, until Edie finally filed papers for an annulment, after barely two years of marriage. Soon after that Kerouac met Neil Cassady, and the rest, as they say, is history.

We also get a detailed picture of life in New York City during the throes of World War II, underpinned with its various privations, strains of patriotism, and the growing conservatism and paranoia that would help fuel the oncoming Cold War. All this provides a large and vibrant context in which the development of the Beats is portrayed.

As Edie says in her foreword,.

"Edie Kerouac-Parker's long-delayed post-humous memoir

Jack Kerouac was the fulfilment and nemesis of my youth. He was not a rebel by nature, but was curious and fascinated by those unlike himself, and could not resist the lure of those temptations. My heart was with him always, but my values ultimately led me back home. I was never able to reconcile the dualities within myself. I never will.

As Edie says in her foreword, Jack Kerouac was the fulfilment and nemesis of my youth.